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The Creative Society is an arts employment charity that helps young people into jobs in the creative and cultural industries.

Gaby’s Story

Gaby Sahhar: ‘Being An Artist Feels Like a Hard Thing to Become’Robbie Wojciechowski

Allowing people of all backgrounds to feel that a creative career is possible, will ensure the artists of the future represent a diverse spectrum of people living in the UK. But it’s often this first hurdle, of feeling like a career is something possible, that most people struggle to pass as Step Up’s Gaby Sahhar has found.

Gaby has been torn between aspiration and accessibility. Poor art education in school left him longing for more, and over the years he has tossed and turned, wondering whether a career in the arts is possible. Making art that is accessible, has been a strong motivation for his work as he struggles to choreograph projects that challenge the dominant arts industry.

His work is powerful. It deals with the complex relationships of power at play in the world and in the body. Issues of identity and accessibility run through his thinking, but in Gaby’s work as an artist, and for a short time as a fashion model, he’s been able to reclaim his body and his mind as a territory for performance, by challenging the status quo.

“I want to celebrate my shaved head, my scrawny Palestinian body, because it’s a myth that I’m here in the first place,” he says.

Much of his work has aimed to look back on the city he has lived and worked in all his life, and understand and reflect on the power dominant in space and place. For Gaby, it is about unpicking the dominant narratives and looking beneath the surface.

“While I was at Goldsmiths, I’d see people would really indulge into the voyeurism of London, the cupcake culture, the shiny fronts. People came to London and made work about Heygate [an estate in South London demolished as part of an urban regeneration programme]. People didn’t and don’t understand the politics of space here.”

Much of his work became a reaction against much of this. Using spy glasses he bought online, Gaby’s focus is to portray a world, a city, that sits under the radar. “A lot of my work deals with public spaces, department stores, underground. It becomes social commentary – to be able to create it, you’ve got to be able to film a certain type of thing. It’s a less invasive way of filming the city.”

His last work, which focused on challenging ideas of masculinity in the corporate world, saw him exhibiting in his local Tesco store. He has received support from the Tate, as part of the Tate Collectives, but he also tlaks excitedly about work exhibited outside the gallery:

“There are so many interesting spaces to work with – whether it’s guerrilla screenings or putting posters up in our community”

It has taken a couple of years for Gaby to build up the confidence to do this. Seven years ago, when he was just leaving school, painting furiously from his bedroom at home, art didn’t feel like an option, even though it seemed to him, like the only thing he really wanted to do..

It was when he found the Tate Collective that the idea of ‘art as a job’ first seemed within his grasp. “It blew my mind with Tate Collectives: seeing political art, meeting the staff in the office, who were making a living working in the arts. Seeing people in positions like that really motivates you.”

“I’ve done loads while there – they’ve taught me how to curate. We curated these events called Undercurrent and Hyperlink, and Late at Tates.”

He’s just curated a “Late at Tate” on Queer British Art, which for the first time has seen him in a senior role within the gallery. But at 24, he’s becoming too old to be part of the ad-hoc community of artists that are involved in the collective. Renting a studio in Bermondsey that he shares for £25 a month with a bunch of other artist, Gaby has managed to craft a small space in the city that feels like it’s his. But his next challenge, will be working out a financial basis in which he can carry on producing work, one that means he won’t have to be tied to the three zero hour contracts he works in the meantime.

“Money and creativity don’t match up. The payment structure in place for people working in our position is so unmatched.”

While Tate has offered him opportunities, they only pay him for the hours he’s physically involved in building and operating the space. But this doesn’t account for the meeting and mental prep time involved in the projects. Whilst Tate have inspired him, engaged him, and got him creating, they pay him little for his contributions.

The dream for Gaby is to make art the backbone of his financial work. “Being an artist feels like a hard thing to become,” he says.